Lupa — local file search for your Mac MCP server

lupa-mcp

Let your AI agent search the documents on your Mac — by what's written inside them.

An MCP server for Lupa, a macOS file search app with its own index. Your agent asks Lupa; Lupa answers from a local index in ~30 ms. Nothing touches the network.

"find the contract that mentions the penalty clause"
        ↓
   lupa_search  →  ranked paths + matching snippets
   lupa_read    →  the document's text, without opening the file

Searches file names and document contents: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, Hangul HWP/HWPX, and scanned PDFs read with OCR.

Why this instead of find/grep

That last row is the point. Your agent gets document contents without you granting it access to your disk.

Requirements

The Lupa app must be installed — this server reads the index that Lupa builds; it does not index anything itself.

1. Install Lupa (free) from the Mac App Store:
2. Open it, add the folders you want searchable, and let indexing finish.

macOS only.

Install

Claude Code

claude mcp add lupa -- npx -y lupa-mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor / any MCP client — add to the client's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lupa": { "command": "/bin/zsh", "args": ["-lc", "npx -y lupa-mcp"] }
  }
}

That's it. No API key, no account, no configuration.

Why /bin/zsh -lc? GUI apps don't inherit your shell's PATH, so a bare

"command": "npx" fails to start with env: npx: No such file or directory

(measured on Claude Desktop and Aside). A login shell finds npx wherever it lives —

Homebrew, nvm, or a system install. In a terminal-based client (Claude Code, Codex)

plain npx -y lupa-mcp is fine.

Agents: don't run lupa-search through your shell. Sandboxed agent shells

(Aside, Codex) kill the App Store-signed CLI at launch — exit code 133 or 134.

Register this MCP server instead; it starts outside that sandbox.

Full guide: https://lupa.kr/agents.html

Tools

lupa_search

lupa_read

Returns the text Lupa already extracted from a file — cheaper than reading the original, and it works for formats your agent cannot parse. Requires Lupa 2.0 or later.

Query syntax

word1 word2      files matching ALL words rank first
n:word           file name only          (name:, 이름:, 文件名:)
c:word           document content only   (content:, 내용:, 内容:)
f:word           folder path contains    (폴더:, 文件夹:)
-word            exclude
"exact phrase"   literal match
.pdf  *.mp3  report*      extension / wildcard
kind:document    document · pdf · hwp · image · video · audio · code · archive · app
size:>10mb       size:<1mb
date:today       date:week · date:month · date:7d · date:2026-06

Korean and Chinese prefixes work too (종류: 크기: 날짜: / 种类: 大小: 日期:).

Korean is handled properly — partial words inside compounds and attached particles both match, which is what Spotlight gets wrong.

Privacy

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.